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Quietly Coercing a Vassals and Fiefdoms Future for All of Us While Hyping Economic Development

I actually am not nostalgic for the castles, moats, or medieval armor. For one thing I like to cook, but not without centralized plumbing or over an open hearth. No, I keep thinking of terms from the Middle Ages because public policies being quietly enacted in the United States as well as other countries via K-12 education remind me a great deal of the previously accepted relationships between ordinary people and political power that was the hallmark of those times. Political authorities dictated what we could be, know, and what we must do while promising to take care of us and to meet our basic needs. It’s always fascinating to me to listen to an elected politician, their advisors, or college professors laying out a ‘new’ view of 21st century ‘rights’ and responsibilities and never quite grasping this is all a reversion back to a much earlier view of citizenship and the entitled prerogatives of those who hold political and economic power.

Stated simply, throughout history, people with power will collude to keep it and expand it using the coercive power of the public sector over people, their behavior, and their property. They do it for their own personal benefit as well as the benefit of those who empowered them. Either by electing them, appointing them, or simply bankrolling them. I am actually not philosophizing here without a purpose. This was one of those rare weeks when I got a chance to ask the kind of legislators who get invited to Education Commission of the States meetings (see last post) if the Common Core was really about Workforce Readiness and didn’t various non-hyped state and federal initiatives tie K-12 as now about career preparation for all students in a politically-driven view of economic development in the future?

I got a yes answer from some rather shocked people who probably wish I had stayed home with my documents. I suspect each of you would get a similar answer if you get to quiz legislators, mayors, or representatives from the Governor’s office in your state. The difference is I had the chance, used it respectfully, but against the background of the kind of documentation of the openly-laid out vision I am going to lay out here today. Just in case any of us get a chance to buttonhole someone during the holiday parties or as legislatures or city councils reconvene after the New Year. Because I understand how all this fits into a dirigiste 21st Century economy (the French term for such political direction), I am paying attentions to sites and sources that are probably not on your radar. We are about to remedy that.

I have a lot more to lay out and we need to keep moving. This past week, CCSSO, one of the formal sponsors of the Common Core so it can tout itself as the more politically palatable “state-led initiative” released its Opportunities and Options: Making Career Preparation Work for Students. The Task Force made 3 recommendations in this detailed report. First, “Enlist the employer community as a lead partner in defining the pathways and skills most essential in today’s economy.” In my book, I explained the 1976 Turchenko vision of how to take control of Western economies while still appearing capitalistic and this CCSSO document fits right in. Secondly, “Set a higher bar for the quality of career preparation programs, enabling all students to earn a meaningful postsecondary degree or credential.”

I am the last person who thinks college is appropriate for all people, but politicians skip over the part of this vision that now sees a 6th grade level of math and literacy skills as all anyone will need in the 21st Century. The third recommendation is to “Make career readiness matter to schools and students by prioritizing it in accountability systems.” Accountability is much like accreditation. It is a largely invisible means to make something mandatory in the classroom without adequately disclosing the changed reality to students, parents, or taxpayers. Now in reading that report, there is no inkling that any of these ideas are anything other than state employees trying to meet industry needs and satisfy that much-hyped skills gap.

We know better though. We are not just aware of WIOA, but also all the federal programs at Labor and Education mandating this shift to a reenvisioned Career Technical Education for all students. I laid out all the federal mandates here. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/banishing-any-distinction-between-academic-technical-and-lifeemployability-skills-active-deceit-everywhere/ Even more fascinating in all the calculated deceit going on to prevent a widespread accurate perception of the true nature of the shifts involved is a mention that the Southern Regional Education Board had a Commission on Career and Technical Education also pursuing this agenda. Now that got my attention since I have been following Gene Bottoms’ work since he first developed his K-12 vision of Techademics while working for the Georgia Department of Education in the 70s.

I knew from my research of the background for Everyday Math that the Soviet Union had adopted the same general idea for its typical student at the same time in the 70s. (The story and cite are in Chapter 3 of my book in the interview with Isaak Wirszup). Now we have a CCSSO document wanting to “align education and the economy” in precisely the treatment of people as “human capital” that governments have the power to dictate to and manipulate as what the USSR envisioned. Needless to say, the phrase “gotta find that” aptly described my thought process. Sure enough, I found “Career Pathways Connecting High School, Work-Based Learning and Postsecondary Education.” Here’s a link, complete with a futile command “Do Not Disseminate.” I can see why given who is listed as involved. http://publications.sreb.org/2014/FINAL_CTEReportExecSumSREBBd061914.pdf

Why, there’s Texas, confirming it did not need the Common Core. June Atkinson from North Carolina is also on board, which would rather explain why she chose to protect the College Board this week over APUSH. That makes more sense if you have a document connecting the revised AP courses to this CTE vision. http://www.careertech.org/sites/default/files/CTE-AP_FINAL.pdf From my state of Georgia, there is the head of the State Board of Education, which is fascinating since a legislative committee after months of hearings decided recently that K-12 curriculum supervision should be the jurisdiction of that Board, not the elected legislature. No effective recourse for rebellion is one way to put it. Also, two-time Broad Foundation winning school district Super, Alvin Wilbanks, who was the first to tell us that the Common Core was really about remaking the nature of the traditional high school. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/listening-in-on-the-confessional-drumbeat-of-the-common-cores-true-purpose-jettisoning-traditional-high-school/

If you live in a southern state from Texas to Virginia, including Oklahoma, you will want to check that list for the officials listed. I want to make sure though that the presence as consultants of people like Marc Tucker, who headed the controversial national standards/ School to Work attempt in the 90s and Anthony Carnevale, who were both with the Carnegie-created National Center on Education and the Economy to align the US to the Soviet vision of education, are not missed. Before his current perch at Georgetown, Carnevale has been pursuing this vision for decades as I laid out here. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/anesthetizing-any-ability-to-blow-up-or-contaminate-a-chosen-politically-useful-narrative/ The listed David Stern is a subsequent director of the same center polytech visionary Robert Beck (Chapter 4 in the book) previously led.

This was a link heavy post because all of this is quite documentable. Most of the people involved in all these reforms have no incentive to connect these dots. We parents and taxpayers though have no choice if we want to escape a future of us and our children functioning as vassals living in a dirigiste fiefdom. All planned around an illusory utopian vision of changing people’s personalities and mental models to voluntarily accept a far more collectivist vision where we each exist to meet other people’s needs.

The extent to which all of this comes together with a Bespoke Fit makes much more sense once we are aware that the global name for this type of K-12 education for this kind of directed economy and society has a name. Productive Learning.

Next time we will exercise our still existing privilege to deny any obligation to accept this vision with fealty, bowing, or general homage.

No wonder there is such an intense desire to limit the capacity to read fluently.

47 thoughts on “Quietly Coercing a Vassals and Fiefdoms Future for All of Us While Hyping Economic Development”

Remember the popular book — Peoplemaking by Virginia Satir — about positive ways to support and encourage growth, development and understanding of the people in your family?

The international schemers and collaborators involved in “transforming” society through contrived 21st Century Learning innovations may call it Productive Learning, but we should correctly call it — sheeplemaking.

Tunya-think of the urban or rural areas where you live where people choose to live for a variety of reasons. Now think of the communitarian ethos we keep stumbling over. People in those areas want to make a middle class living whereever they are and whether they produce enough to justify someone paying them that much. This is not just a public sector Ponzi scheme between countries but within them too.

To impose an “you are obligated to do for me” responsibility. AS usual I am giving plenty of cites but nowhere near the documentation that guides my understanding.

The idea of school as a career training ground is fatally flawed by the speed of technological progress. I thought the idea of teaching students to read blueprints and understand geometry was interesting. However, how many people need to fully understand the basics of construction if all you have to do is push print? http://wordlesstech.com/2012/04/23/3d-print-your-own-house-video/

It seems all of this ‘career readiness’ is in the future, not in the near past or present. “Everything will be glorious in the future comrade. This innovation will allow us to achieve the goals of the five year plan in four!”

This issue is often discussed here as if ‘career readiness’ really has anything to do with being ready for a career.

‘Educators’ love new stuff and confuse it with improvement. Look! A white board! A computer linked white board! An Internet linked white board!

These people exist in a world of words not connected to anything real. They love to talk to each other. “Techademics.” Wow. A new word. I hope the person who coined it got a promotion and a corner office. Maybe they even wrote a book. /sarcasm

I stumbled upon an old book.http://www.amazon.com/The-Vision-Anointed-Self-Congratulation-Social/dp/046508995X
From a review:1. Social policy is often built based on a perceived, “crisis.”
2. That a “crisis,” even exists, usually goes unchallenged, or ignored.
3. When said social policy fails to accomplish its stated objective, attempts are made to change the initial objective, or simply ignore the outcome.
“The Anointed,” as Sowell calls them, are those who identify the crisis, put forth the policies, and then, if they fail, obfuscate the results. They live in a self justifying world, where what they “envision” is correct and moral *a priori.* Those who disagree are demonized as simpleminded and mean-spirited.

From a different review:This modern-liberal elite exerts its influence through institutions that live by words: the universities and public schools, the media, the liberal clergy, the bar and bench. Its dominance results from its command of the information that words convey and the attitudes that words inspire.

People who live by words should live also by arguments, butas Sowell richly documentsthe modern-liberal elite is not so good at arguing as it is at finding substitutes for argument….

eclectic-so glad you picked up on the futurist aspects of this. That’s one of the aspects that has always made planned economies so enormously wasteful of resources because they spend on what is sought by planners, not potential purchasers using their own money. The Annie B Casey Foundation that pushes so much of the womb/cradle to preschool aspect of this social vision also has an initiative called the Workplace Narrative Project.

If you are me and tend to look up everyone involved and see the author of that paper as working for an entity called Collaborative Economics, you look that up to. Here’s his cv http://www.coecon.com/assets/doughenton_coecon.pdf . He founded CE in July 1993 (as School to Work and the Clinton’s were ramping up the previous effort at all this) “after a decade as assistant director of SRI International’s Center for Economic Competitiveness.” SRI is the Stanford Research Group that was spun off, but remains heavily involved in the behavioral sciences among other things. Henton;s time at SRI would have overlapped with Marina Gorbis, now the President of Institute for the Future whose declarations have earned her a tag on this blog. It would also have overlapped with Willis Harman, another futurist, who wrote Global Mind Change. He also has a tag.

Look at the Kennedy School hyping Henton’s book Grassroots Leaders for the New Economy, which describes precisely what these legislators who actually work for real estate developers or development authorities in their real life jobs hope is the economy that no longer has ill consequences for rural areas or a Newark or Detroit inner city.

“A seminal work in fleshing out the kind of leadership we need to renew and prepare our communities for the demands of democracy in this coming era.”

What coming era? The OPM has run out in large part because of this fiction that whether someone is a productive contributor over and above just showing up matters. We have borrowed as individuals and countries to postpone those real consequences, but that can and our kicking ability are now seriously constrained. Politicians with these sector partnerships and mind arson and personality manipulation in the schools are making it worse. We can get out of this predicament, but these are not the remedies.

The audio at the right of the page at this link is the recollections of Dr Lawrence Dunegan of a lecture attended on March 20, 1969 at a meeting of the Pittsburgh Pediatric Society given by Dr Richard Day claiming inside knowledge of trends of the new world order program to take control of humanity. Hind-site of 40+ years hence is 20/20; you can easily discern the level of accuracy of what has come to pass so far; but there is much more still to come. It is well worth listening to: https://archive.org/details/New_Order_of_Barbarians_remaster_tapes_1to3

You write about life in general. I am concerned about overpopulation, illiteracy, but now at 91 my life has collapsed in the last 6 months – I am now 99% blind and all I want is to leave this life, but although suicide is legal in UK, helping it to happen is not. I have tried (and failed) the razor blade, and now m bored stiff, a day only of TV, and soon that will go. I will be left just a lump in bed, blind, deaf, incommunicado. I long for death.
But the Falconer study recently for the HoC limited its interest to those within 6 months of death. I could live for years just a cabbage, helpless, and the cost either to my family or taxpayers is enormous. How many like me?
Will your website consider this, please? Euthanasia is legal in Oregon. Will it spread? The Dignitas in Switzerland is only for those dying to speed it up, not for me. It seems email will be my last form of communication – for how long? A week?
How many of you in the end will long for a quick, immediate death?

My goodness Mona. I am so sorry that your health has deteriorated so. In the book Living in a Socialist USA that came out last year and was supportive of that vision, the Thanksgiving 50 years from now look back made me so sad because it basically said no unusual efforts after the age of 70. It also pointed out that many who advocated for socialism did so because they did not understand the implications of a zero sum, materialistic view of the world.

I am worried about you. I wish I knew someone in your part of the UK who could look in on you.

Maybe this will help raise your spirits. One of the aspects I have been nailing down in the days I am not posting in recent months is the Marxist view of language that led to the duplicitously sold Whole Language then and Close Reading now. Because I was directed to particular books and articles and I have now read those, I have a terrifically solid knowledge now of why valuable work like yours on how to teach reading properly has been rejected. In fact, I am working today on a 1982 book acknowledging openly how much print changes the structure of the brain.

A very sad letter came in today to this blog. Why to this blog, you might ask? Perhaps this is the only place in the world that is dealing with the serious question of the deliberate suppression of man’s search for truth via independent reading.

Mona McNee is 91, near blind, collapsing, and longing for departure from this world. Her letter of despair fails to mention her greatest regret — that all her lifework (and of others in the cause) has been futile. Yet, she needs to stay a while to hear homages about her great and significant contribution to our daily struggles.

Yes, Mona, we are indebted to your work and persistence in promoting the “right to read” cause. You have done so much to advance the phonetic approach — a proven method too quickly dismissed by mean slackers.

I am really looking forward to reading this book Mona coauthored — Great Reading Disaster: Reclaiming Our Educational Birthright. Yes, decoding and reading ARE a birthright — we must understand our world in order to lead a meaningful life. Otherwise, we are just sheep to be herded — mute and stuck in superficiality.

As a parent’s rights advocate for over 40 years I could never understand why something so elementary as reading should be such a political issue and why mean people would deny and withhold this power. This is an issue not yet solved — the real “why”.

Meanwhile, Mona, I hope tributes do come in to soothe your despondency.

Some good news I can convey is that Australia is finally on the right road (not, however, without the usual detractors and naysayers). Australia has just completed a Review of Curriculum and these are two headlines that hit the news just a few months ago:

Thanks Tunya and Aaron for telling Mona how her work has and will still impact the lives of others in a helpful way.

Mona and I have exchanged emails a great deal offline and I know her frustration has only increased this past year amid the determination not to teach reading properly in the UK under any party or Prime Minister’s stewardship.

I may go deep, but those were the layers where the ultimate answers are. Because I know the actual implementation so well, I have been able to backtrack back from reasons given for preferring the preliterate mindset because it was malleable and group oriented to precisely what the same argument is called now. With a different explanation of course which the EduDoctorate simply parrot back mindlessly.

I cannot WAIT to learn what you understand now about Marxist view of language that has given us Whole language, Site Words, Blended Learning and Close reading.

I’ve made educated guesses of course…but having proof to point to would do my language loving brain a world of good.
I’ve remarked on it all before but language and words and all the myriad ways it is improperly taught, obfuscated, changed, and manipulated is so very key to unraveling the web of poison that has taken over so many people’s minds.

I remember as a kid reading Orwell’s 1984 and thinking that Newspeak was to my mind the most arguably dangerous and devastating part of the slave state.

Honestly Mari this is fascinating because it fits the actual implementation so well and why David Coleman was so glowing in his intro of Lauren Resnick.

Luria published in Russian in 74, translated into English in 76, and the Resnicks plural launch a bogus explanation in 77 published in Harvard’s Educational Review to launch a “why we must teach reading differently” strategy.

As usual Michael Cole is heavily involved. The books that are cited in turn have bibliographies that tell me of other articles and books.

Everything though is still grounded in what is in that book. Just more detail on the why reading had to be transactional.

I also read the 1940 book The City of Man this week. It now has BINGO!! written numerous times in the margin. It still fits with what is being sought and especially with what was pushed as the World Republic in 48 at Chicago and then later as WOMP.

Second-hand I can see that you have done wonderful things in your life. Nothing is futile, or everything is, because the same problems keep coming around. You helped for a while and that will always matter. And you may have provided tools that will help on into the future. It’s all anyone can do.

I wish you control over your life’s remaining chapter or chapters, however few or many you wish.

Help is coming for Mona. That address I posted earlier about what is planned for the future of the world, by a small elite, that was given to the Pediatrics Society in 1969 does talk about the “demise pill” coming in the future. The planned “optionality” of it, however, is not what one would hope. I found a better link to the talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gjc4ywQVHEQ

That is truly a grotesque story LL. I knew about the cronyism, but approaching companies in the vc rounds of financing like that who can benefit from advocacy is hugely troubling. To run for office anyway is the mindset of an oligarch.

Called that one accurately. Mandate too much stressful testing. Hype all that stress. Sell Opt Out as the remedy. Cause Opt Out to lead to a federal remedy that enshrines the pschophysiological sculpting and monitoring into the classroom. People do not object because (a) they do not understand the radically different nature of what is misnamed when it is called a ‘test’; and (b) they are getting the remedy they ‘asked for’.

The same psychologicAL POINT IS IN THE 1988 Charter plan from the feds. People fight having things imposed on them, but they will tolerate and even celebrate the same practices and policies if they believe they are consensual. Plus the research from psych shows they tend not to investigate further because the previous involvement in the advocacy makes the typical person believe they are vested in the ‘success’ of the remedy they advocated for.

Psychology, like Marxism and sociology, are all disciplines I never wanted to learn that have been foisted on me in my 50s simply because they are so implicated in Radical Ed Reform in the words of its advocates.

Rep. Bonamici, always one to step in to the plans. A friend to the BAT movement and all things radical. The supporters, all big on Equity. Is it really about the test. Come on. Their tactics are getting old. Yet, no one here will question a thing, Governor wants to spend an additional 18 million on Ed this year. A new campaign beginning to hype how Or schools are less funded than other states. No mention though how top heavy we are in administrative expenses, or how retirees make more than any day in the classroom. It will slide through unquestioned, hand in hand with the Governor who was reelected despite scandal and illegal activity.

Yet at the same time it makes advocacy like that egregious Aspen report make more sense as well as the increasing funding from the Gates Foundation. Bill Gates brought that summit to Seattle in September, first time outside China.

As a high school English teacher I recently came across the work of Richard Mitchell, and his irreverent newsletter, “The Underground Grammarian.” (http://www.sourcetext.com/grammarian/) I’ve been sponging up as much as I can from his book “Less Than Words Can Say.” He spells out exactly what’s wrong with not teaching language and the underlying rules of grammar: without it the mind can’t think.

My heart goes out to Mona McNee, and in my current role teaching teens in a drug rehab facility I have ordered all of her books off of Amazon UK, as I know they will be a useful resource with students who have missed a lot (perhaps to their benefit) of school-based language training.

Yes, Mona, Thank you !
And yet, we also acknowledge the vast number of individuals for whom “phonics” does not allow them to learn to decode. Precisely, these are those individuals who are often labeled as dyslexic, but are in reality, not able to discriminate the auditory differences in phonemes. This can be easily detected by standing behind an individual and asking them to distinguish between sounds such as “chick” and “quick.”
For these folks the Lindamood-Bell decoding program is literally a God-send. This method was designed by a Speech and Language Pathologist, Patricia Lindamood and Nanci Bell. When Mrs. Lindamood was asked, in person, by a friend of mine, (a brilliant SLP in her own right), how she arrived at this ingenious method of teaching decoding to those unable to discriminate the phonemes….Patricia Lindamood said, she prayed. Amazing story. God gave her the insights, she wrote the outline of the method the next day…and the rest is history. And one that has served as a life giving method to many for whom traditional phonics, with its plethora of varieties does not “work.”
Additional intervention that greatly aids in the development of phonemic awareness, for those that have not had opportunity to develop them due to circumstances, such as Eastern orphanages etc. is the Integrated Listening Systems, use of full spectrum music, via headphones using bone conduction to create the neurologic pathways to recognize these phonemes. (you can’t speak, what you cannot hear….) This method must be implemented with a professional, and careful attention to trauma in the past of the individual…
Thank you again, Robin, Moni and faithful platoon for providing us the truth to act upon for such times as these and the future !

Here’s a footnote from the “Career Pathways” document that shows how they are screwing up vocational education to dumb it down too!

Tennessee is retooling its career pathways to offer greater academic and technical rigor and align seamlessly with postsecondary
programs leading to emerging jobs. The state has retired outdated career-technical courses and is developing new or revising
existing courses to blend academic college- and career-readiness standards with technical standards. In the case of a Plant and
Soil Science course, for example, older course standards for one module required students to define terms related to soil
chemistry and plant nutrition, perform soil pH analyses and assess plants for signs of disease. Revised standards require students
to apply their knowledge of plant growth and diseases by recommending treatments and prescribing preventative control
measures for major crops. The module’s technical standards are linked with new state reading, writing and biology standards.

So they’re going to “act like experts” and make expert recommendations based on something they are taught to parrot back, and they’ll never learn to measure pH or get a broad exposure to concepts of soil chemistry or plant nutrition. Probably this will be a part of a writing assignment, “writing across the curriculum”!

And when they get out they won’t know anything or be teachable for anything, and their school years will be gone.

Our local vo-tech consortium doesn’t seem to have classes where student spend a solid block of time tearing down and rebuilding a car engine. But they have classes where they write about it, demonstrating various writing skills.

If I run a repair shop or a racing shop and I need someone to write a letter to the editor about car repair, I’ll be looking forward to hiring these folks.

How about ….? In the case of a Plant and Soil Science course, for example, older course standards for one module required students to define terms related to soil chemistry and plant nutrition, perform soil pH analyses assess plants for signs of disease, and actually go outdoors and touch icky soil and plants which could have dirt and herbicides on them. Revised standards have students learn about plants by playing farming simulation games and learning about soil by researching Wikipedia. The module’s technical standards are linked with new state reading, writing biology, climate change, and gender studies standards.

We are not asking these questions of bright college students with a store of facts. Have I mentioned how tired I am of seeing facts in scare quotes like this–‘facts’?

We are asking these questions of inert minds and unstocked bright minds and basically trying to train students to see what they feel or believe as on parity with what is demonstrably provable. That genuine facts are just a matter of differing perspectives.

Note the references to the College Board’s participation in it and then the solutions later is equal participation in advanced coursework. Except we know because we have been following the cte integration angle and the changes to AP coursework and what rigorous really means is that this is a way to shift to polytech group work involving the computer for all students and detrack so that ‘inert minds’ get full inclusion anyway without anyone having to ‘fess up that is what is going on.

Notice the supposed human right to equal participation in the workplace and society. First that’s a call for quotas in hiring and is only possible in a cooperative commonwealth planned economy and society. Secondly if barriers to equal participation must be eliminated and we all know student orgs can matter as much to who gets hired where as that diploma, how much incentive did a higher ed bureaucrat/sociologist like Teresa Sullivan have to overreact to the Rolling Stone rape story and try to use it to bring the frats and sororities under her control?

Here are the IHEP partners including Ford and the Gates Foundations. http://www.ihep.org/about-ihep/partners/funding-partners Also notice that Lumina is listed without any mention of their determination to create the Diploma Qualification Profile to radically remake college coursework to both politically radicalize and make the degree easier.

Use CTE integration to destroy academics beyond a techademics level in K-12 and DQP to change the nature of college. You get a civil rights obligation for Equity of Credentials and no one;s degree has much value beyond the jobs created to provide these worthless degrees. The holders of worthless degrees then pressure pols at all levels to make their middle class dream happen. And this entire Death Spiral gets obscured under labels like Competency and College and Career Ready.

And if I had not worked full time on this for more than 4 years now, all of these clear links would remain unlinked in the public mind. This vision of college really achieves the dream of that 1998 conference on higher ed I explained in the book. Wow.

Yes, I think this thing of semi-professionals calling themselves “professional” started around the 1980’s. I chuckled at it then, but the idiocracy is winning.

Maybe it just means they don’t get union protections any more. But wait, public school teachers do get those protections. So they’re both “professionals” and bargaining-unit employees, and with routine tenure after 3 years to boot. Sweet.

I suspect the vo-techs have been gutted worse than academic high schools so far. That’s what I see in the very small local sample anyway. The students and their parents are not effective advocates or often aware of issues that might get alerted by some parents of more academically inclined highschoolers.

From the linked story: “I feel it’s important to promote data literacy among youth and the general population so they can analyze information with a critical eye, understand what statistics mean and learn more about the community in which they live.”
…
“By going through the process of gathering and analyzing data, the students learned more about how the lottery operates, and they learned how to use data as a civic engagement tool,” said Williams in a prepared statement. “They now have experience engaging in a more informed public debate on civic topics.”

So the students spend a lot of time on this just to learn the odds of winning the lotto? ‘Civic engagement’ means not talking to or meeting anyone in the community?

Apparently 100 high schools in the NYC area have already signed on. For many this is how cte comes in. I am married to someone who wrote code in high school because of his high level of math and science schools and grew up with someone who was at MIT while I was in high school. You can teach students to “do things” with the computer and code created for them to work with, but that’s not what computer science is really about anymore that US History is about the futuristic global concepts La Pietra wanted as an emphasis.

“Today, 4,500 volunteers in Brigades across 125 cities come together regularly to hack for better local government —…”.HA! Nothing says lefty like “brigade.” Whatever happened to “comrade” and “proletarian”?

The author of this Code for America piece?Jennifer Pahlka is the founder and executive director of Code for America. She recently served as the US Deputy Chief Technology Officer in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy….

That would mean that the former Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra mentioned by the sreb as an advisor to the vision in this post was Jennifer’s boss while she was at the WH. It also ties her to John Holdren’s domain. Remember Newmindedness?

It sounds better than a planned economy and Industrial Policy, but the name does not change the essence.

Love the part about the Administration using the grant process to make the entire system, and not just federal programs, more “job-driven”. The Common Core as I have always said is such a Bait and Switch.

One more comment on IHEP and its Access document. It is a partner in the Workforce Data Quality Canpaign, which is a motherlode of the ties really going on between the feds and the states.

Interestingly the Board of IHEP http://www.ihep.org/about-ihep/who-we-are/board-directors has someone from the USG Board which would explain why Georgia legislators are especially aware the Common Core is really about merging economic development and workforce development in a government/education/Big Business Alliance.

Also a rep from the DREB who produced the report in the post as well as Education Counsel, the public policy proponent tied to Richard Riley’s law firm that also advises the CCSSO and individual school districts. Remember he is the Vice Chair of Carnegie that created the Naional Center on Education and the Economy in 1985 after being part of the agreements among the US State Department and the Soviet Pedagogical Sciences. Again Carnevale and Marc Tucker, both of whom consulted with the SREB on all this, worked for NCEE in the late 80s.

Actually so did the Gates Foundation’s Vicki Phillips, but not until sometime in the 90s.

Doesn’t it feel like we should be singing “Hail, Hail the Gang’s All Here?”

Tunya-remember that the Center for American Progress has said it wants the US and Canada to remain separate countries but to have a common economic policy. This would be it. That also came out as one of the partners to the Workplace Data Quality Campaign is CERC–the Center for Regional Economic Competitiveness. CERC has worked with Ontario, Georgia’s Workforce Readiness, NC’s Statewide Plan, Metro Nashville’s. Etc. Etc.

I want to say a few appreciative words about Mona McNee. She is one of the great culture warriors of the last several decades. She was indomitable in support of systematic phonics. Reading is the essential skill, so when the progressives set out to undermine the US, UK, et al, they knew they had to sabotage reading. They have done this with tremendous skill and an endlessly evil creativity. They continue to undermine reading. You can go on the Internet now and find scores or perhaps hundreds of sites giving away lists of Dolch words, sight-words, etc. So I would like to suggest that if anyone wishes to honor the spirit and work of Mona McNee, then continue her work by every means possible. Of all the reforms that you may hear discussed, the most important without any question is removing Whole Word (which has about a dozen different names) from the schools, replacing it with phonics, and then making sure that every child learns to read in the first year or two of school. As Mona McNee says in her book, “Reading schemes should not go on forever and after two years children should be capable of choosing their own books.” (In most school systems, that means age 7 at the latest.) We need a lot more Mona McNees, that’s what we desperately need. Then we can save reading and all the rest. Conversely, if we do not save reading, we will not save anything at all.

Well said Bruce. I am going to expand on what is in Chapter 2 of my book on why schools no longer want to teach reading phonetically in the next post. It actually ties into the cte integration and what is known globally as Productive Learning.

Mona deserves to have it laid out in her honor and within the last four days or so I have nailed it down as more used books have hit my side porch.

Hopefully tomorrow. Today I am plowing through that SRI report on the integration of Linked Learning/CTE and the Common Core. I just noticed that ConnectED’s Gary Hoachlander is listed as a consultant to the SREB in that June 2014 report I cited in this post and is thanked by SRI for all his work on integrating Linked Learning and the Common Core.

Zipping it up is probably the more apt metaphor for what is sought since there are usually gaps between buttons.

I still maintain the way out is a wide prevailing accurate understanding of what is really going on as laid out in my on-the-money book, this blog, and from me in person when I speak. No one will take questions like I will because to me this is documented and factual.